Social Media

Hoovers Buys Visible Path; Launches Hoover's Connect

Hoover's today launched officially the Hoover's Connect social network, a very highly engineered social network for businessmen intent on networking and establishing relationships with targeted prospects. The launch announcement comes hand in hand with confirmation of the rumored agreement Hoovers has made to acquire Visible Path, a company responsible for powering Hoover's Connect in it's beta last year.

Visible Path is a service that provides connections for businesses, mapping a company’s social graphs. Or, as Kristen put it in her review last month, "a custom LinkedIn for just your company, and the peripheral contacts outside of the company that are made through individual connections."

Visible Path scans desktop applications like Outlook, and keeps an up-to-date graph those in your immediate network, detailing who you're strongest and most numerous connections are. Hoovers Connect takes the functionality of Visible Path and adds to it the layers of privacy protection they've been working on in the system allowing the users to have full control over who to invite into their network and to whom they want to grant others access within their network. Users have the option to either stay cloaked or identify themselves.

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